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Six Reasons Your Business Needs A Managed Solution For Its Financial Applications

Last week we announced that Mediolanum, the Dublin-based asset management arm of the Mediolanum Banking Group, had chosen Options as its new managed application and hosting provider. On the back of that news, we wanted to explore further why a fully managed application solution makes good business sense for your firm.

1. It Allows You To Focus On Your Core Business

We have seen a huge shift in market conditions over the past few years. Firms that traditionally managed their applications internally are now looking to migrate to a managed offering. An increased focus on internal costs is one factor but the desire to focus solely on their core business is also a consideration.

A managed service provider with the right experience, processes and technical automation can allow firms to fully outsource the management of their business-critical production environments, freeing them to focus on their core competencies.

2. Risk Mitigation & Experience

Ever increasing compliance has impacted organisations on a number of fronts and the need to keep up-to-date with regional regulatory requirements can be extremely taxing. A managed solution can mitigate the risk and take the responsibility away from your business to a vendor with experience of supporting compliant financial applications.

Fully managed application solutions can also transform implementation projects for financial firms as the underlying global network and data centre infrastructure is already in place. This existing global infrastructure allows for a much smoother deployment in addition to cutting costs, lead times and base implementation risk.

Options’ managed platform, engineering and delivery expertise greatly simplifies the entire process. We have developed rigorous controls and polices, further de-risking projects, and all new builds are deployed within an industry-leading postproduction operational framework.

3. Total Cost of Ownership

How much does an application actually cost your business to run? Time and again, I speak to business heads that struggle to properly determine the exact amount they are spending each month on all the key components required to manage their own applications. The cost of compliance, security, 24/7 support and licensing alone is enough to severely dent the bottom-line of any business.

We have covered the thorny issue of pricing in managed services in some detail on this blog already. And as we highlighted at the time, Options is committed to a fixed monthly fee. We understand that cost certainty is a key component of doing business, we don’t have hidden charges or additional fees based on volume of support required. We provide a transparent monthly cost for a complete managed service, from the power, cooling and hardware all the way up the application stack.

4. Change Agility

Investment management firms (asset managers like Mediolanum) are increasingly recognising that change agility is critical to business success within financial services. The ability to deliver change quickly in a controlled environment, governed by tried and tested change processes, should be a crucial differentiator for anyone considering a managed application provider.

Delivering managed solutions to client firms demands a platform that blends reliability and security with operational agility. The ability to deliver change quickly and effectively is going to give your firm a key competitive advantage over the competition and as such, your managed service provider should offer a platform with the required technical resources, change control processes and delivery functions.

5. Security

Some firms are only just waking up to the threat of cybersecurity and particularly the vulnerabilities around their proprietary applications. If you consider your firm and your applications among those exposed then correcting the problem will only be possible with sizeable investment in your existing infrastructure – a daunting undertaking for any firm.